“Let us in,” Berols’ Anna crooned.
“But how?”
“Remove the names. Set the words free. Just a little more. Burn a little more.”
“Like the library.”
“Yes. A little more.”
“Then you’ll come?”
“Then we’ll come. You’ll be everything. You’ll all be everything.”
Berols’ Anna grazed Vanja’s cheek and raised her chin. Vanja opened her eyes and looked into Berols’ Anna’s face, and it suddenly snapped into focus.
The night after Lars had told her about the lights in the sky above the old world, Vanja had had a dream. The gray veil that enshrouded the sky had cracked and blown away. Against a deep black background, gigantic spheres, glowing in colors Vanja had never seen before, slowly moved through the heavens with a sound that shook the earth. The ground fell away beneath her. She hung suspended in the void, inconceivably small amid the glory of the spheres.
That same feeling returned when she looked into Berols’ Anna’s eyes. It blew everything else away.
—
Vanja didn’t know how much time had passed since she’d climbed down the shaft, but it was still late evening or night when she came back up. The pipes rising into the sky no longer terrified her. They belonged to Amatka. All around her was the low creaking of new pipes pushing out of the ground.
The streets were empty. From some houses noise as if from a party or a fight could be heard. The scrap boxes outside the buildings had been knocked over. From one of them a large puddle of gloop had leaked onto the pavement. Somewhere to the east was Nina, swept up in the hysteria.
The door to the commune office was open. Windows were lit here and there in the building, especially on the top floor where the committee was at work. The reception was dark, but when Vanja turned on a desk lamp, it became apparent that someone had been there at some point during the evening. Papers and logs were in disarray, and the door to the archive stood ajar. Downstairs, the sort of inventory lists that were plastered throughout the colony lay scattered on the floor. The door to the secure archive was still closed and locked. It would never open without a key. Vanja stuck her hand into the pocket of her anorak, fingering the coagulated piece of gloop.
There were plenty of marking pens in the reception. Once back down in the archive, Vanja closed the door behind her, took the spoon-shaped lump from her pocket, and wrote KEY on the shaft. “Key, key, key, key, key,” she whispered.
It twitched in her hand. Something inside Vanja resisted. Calling a thing by another name still gave rise to a vague, indeterminate horror that made her brain glitch. She gritted her teeth and closed her eyes. “Key, key, key, key. This is a key. I am holding a key in my hand.”
When she opened her eyes again, she was holding a stick that branched at one end. Calling it a key was a bit of a stretch. But then, she hadn’t given it a lock to open. She pushed the key-thing into the lock on the door to the secure archive. “Key, key, key.”
The key-thing let itself sink into the lock. Vanja pushed until she met resistance and closed her eyes again. “The key has cuts that fit the bolts in the lock. The cuts are hard enough to move the bolts. The key fits the lock. The cuts on the bit fit the bolts. The key can open the lock.” Her head hurt.
Eventually she opened her eyes again. She tried to turn the stick to the left but lost her grip—the key didn’t have a proper bow, after all. Vanja screwed her eyes shut. “The key has a bow, the key has a bow, the key has a bow.”
The gloop flattened between her fingers and her headache intensified, converging sharply at a point behind her left eye. But she could turn the key now. The bolts rotated with a series of clicks. She pulled the key out again and put it in her pocket. Then she opened the door to the secure archive.
It wasn’t much bigger than a bathroom; all it held was a filing cabinet with three drawers. The topmost drawer had a handwritten label that read INCIDENT REPORTS; the other two were labeled HISTORY and RULES AND REGULATIONS. Vanja opened INCIDENT REPORTS. It contained a suspension-file system with folders in receding chronological order. The oldest folders were thin, but the closer they came to the present day, the thicker the files grew. Vanja pulled out the outermost folder and opened the cover. According to a helpful little index, the folder contained one form per incident. The report titles referred to the type of event: Collapse, Increased Dissolution per Quadrant, something called Manifestations.
One Seconday, someone had seen a train arrive and then vanish from where it was parked on the rails.
A group of children had been playing unapproved games in a corner of Children’s House Four. Someone had begun to pretend that one thing was another. Suddenly every single object in the room had dissolved.
There were several cases of people appearing at the edges of the colony. The individuals could not be identified as citizens and “looked strange.”
The latest incident report was only a few days old. It concerned the collapse in the mushroom chambers and the subsequent discovery of the pipes. A summary of Ivar’s statement was attached to the form. There was no mention of yesterday’s events, or the day before that. Maybe they were too busy now to write reports. Vanja leafed back through the years. The same types of events occurred again and again.
At the far back, a folder containing a stapled bundle of papers. The title read Fish in Balbit. The reports described an event where the first generation of children had started playing a new game: they went “fishing.” The children had learned about “fish” from the books their parents had brought with them from the old world. Previous investigations had established that ocean life had evolved no further than algae. Even so, the children were pulling “fish” out of the water.
According to the informant, the adults discovered what was going on only when the children, who had been left unsupervised, had pulled a large amount of “fish” out of the water.
The informant states that the things scattered around the children could superficially be said to resemble fish, but upon dissection turned out to have “neither guts nor spine, just some sort of gunk inside.” It emerged that the children had organized a competition. The children would take turns announcing the description of the fish they planned to catch and were awarded points according to how much the catch resembled the description.
A decision was made on the spot to confiscate and destroy all books containing pictures and descriptions of marine wildlife. Furthermore, a motion will be proposed to the Central Administration in Essre for stricter regulation of contents in books available to the public, and to children in particular. This incident is particularly alarming considering the recent events in Colony 5.
Vanja closed the drawer and opened the next one. The files had been shoved in haphazardly, meeting protocols jumbled with what looked like essays and lists. Vanja reached into the very back of the drawer and pulled out one of the oldest folders.
Edict: Name Usage
* * *
After the tragic events that lay waste to Sunborough, it is the decision of the Central Administration that all names of places and people in the colonies be regulated, effective immediately. Any name that refers to a thing or animal, is immediately homonymic with a word used to denote another meaning in modern language, or in any other way attributes qualities to the place or person shall be changed to an approved name. Approved names shall be simple and mirror the origin of the majority of the pioneers. All place-names will be replaced with a letter combination chosen at random. New place-names are as follows:
Designation/Old name/New name
Colony 1 / Base / Essre
Colony 2 / Seaview / Balbit
Colony 3 / Oilfield / Odek
Colony 4 / Frostville / Amatka
Colony 5 / Sunborough / —
They had named Colony 5 after a light in the sky, and the world had replied.
—
Vanja put the papers back into the folder and looked at her wrist clock. It would be
morning soon. She couldn’t waste the night reading if she were to have any hope of doing what she had come for. She pulled the bottom drawer out and off its tracks. It was so heavy she could barely lift it. She lugged it upstairs to the reception, where she left it under the front desk. She repeated the process with the other two drawers and returned to the main archive.
With all the drawers completely pulled out, the space left in the middle was just big enough to stand in. Vanja looked around. All this paper really only served one purpose: to anchor the colony’s shape, to keep people from breaking free. It would burn in no time at all. All she had to do was set fire to it. Set fire to it and scatter the secure archive in the streets. Then she would tell them. She would tell them all. People had a right to know how trapped they were, how much they had never been allowed to know, how they had never been allowed to choose what life they wanted to live.
Vanja abruptly realized she had nothing to light the paper with. She had never even owned a lighter. Evgen had had one, not she. She drummed her hands on her thighs in frustration. “Come on, burn,” she hissed at the archive. “Burn.”
A few of the papers rustled as if in a breeze. Of course. Vanja let out a laugh. She pulled a bundle of mycopaper out of the closest drawer and stared at it. “You’re burning,” she told the paper. “You’re burning, burning, burning.”
When the mycopaper flared up, it was so sudden it scorched her fingertips and made her drop it. It landed in a box of mixed good and mycopaper. The good paper wasn’t immune to the flames. It almost burned better than the mycopaper. Vanja took papers from the other drawers, lit them and put them back, until half of the archive was ablaze and the flames were spreading rapidly on their own. Black smoke roiled up toward the ceiling, choking her. She crawled up the stairs on her hands and knees.
—
They were waiting for her at the front desk. A clerk was crouched by the drawers from the secure archive, going through the folders. Two sturdy couriers were on their way through the reception toward the archive door. They stepped back as Vanja threw the door open and smoke poured out.
“There she is!” the clerk yelled.
Two shoulders slammed into Vanja’s ribs as the couriers both tackled her.
—
The sky was brightening as they led Vanja through the streets. One of the couriers had landed a blow on the side of her head. Her field of vision had darkened for a moment, and after that it was hard to think properly. Moving her head hurt.
The noise that cut through the air was low at first, then rose in pitch and volume, then fell again, up and down. Vanja and her captors all looked up. All around the colony, pipes loomed against the sky. They were wailing.
FIFDAY
It could have been any office: a desk with a notepad, one chair behind the desk, another in front of it. A few inspirational posters on the wall. Behind the desk sat a middle-aged man in rumpled overalls. His hair was a little too long, his beard slightly unkempt; it made him seem absent-minded in a friendly way. Vanja had been gagged. It happened after her head cleared up and she had tried—and almost succeeded—to set fire to one of the couriers’ overalls. In response, they had gagged her and tied her hands behind her back. The gag chafed at the corners of her mouth. The restraints cut into her wrists. Leaning back on the chair put an unpleasant strain on her shoulders. The fatigue and excitement had made her shaky and cold, and her vision wavered. When she shifted in the chair, a heavy hand landed on her shoulder, holding her still.
The man folded his hands on the desk in front of him and studied Vanja. He gave her a sad smile. “Brilars’ Vanja Essre Two. That’s you, isn’t it?”
Vanja glared at him.
The man sighed quietly. “No, you don’t have to try to answer. I know it’s you. Brilars’ Vanja Essre Two, recently arrived from Essre to conduct market research. You met a woman, quit your job, and settled here. So far, so good. But now you’ve lost your way. Well.” He held out his hands, palms up. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Ladis’ Harri. I’m the speaker of Amatka’s committee. First of all, Vanja, I have to inform you that you’ve been arrested for destruction of public property, endangering the public, and subversive activity. And I feel it’s important that you and I have a conversation about what happened. I would like to know how all this came to pass.”
Harri stood up and leaned across the desk. He smelled faintly of coffee and liquor. “I’m thinking I might take the gag off, Vanja. Otherwise it’ll be hard for us to talk. But I have to be sure you won’t do anything foolish. Leila is standing right behind you, and she’ll sedate you if you do. And that would be a pity, because I would really like to talk to you. Can you promise me that we can talk in a calm and collected manner?”
Vanja nodded. Harri smiled and gave the courier behind her a nod. The gag came off, and the pressure around her head eased. Vanja grimaced and licked the corners of her mouth.
Harri leaned back in his chair. “Well, then. So, Vanja. Were you working with someone?”
Vanja shook her head.
Harri nodded slowly. “I should tell you that Nina was the one who reported you.”
His words sank into the pit of her stomach.
“She came to us last night, after you disappeared,” he continued. “She told us everything. It wasn’t easy for her, you know. She really does love you. She said that you’ve displayed subversive tendencies, but that she’d been hoping you’d come to your senses. And then yesterday you absconded from the leisure center. You told her you were going home?” He pulled out a drawer and took out a thermos and two mugs. “Nina went home to make up with you. Of course, you weren’t there. Instead, she found your notes.”
Vanja gasped. Harri paused and looked at her. “That’s right,” he said. “So she decided to do what she thought was best for everyone. And that’s what you and I are going to talk about. Doing what’s best for everyone. Coffee?”
Vanja declined to answer and looked away. Harri looked a little hurt. He unscrewed the lid and poured himself a cup. “We have something of an emergency on our hands.” He sipped the coffee. The hand holding the cup shook a little. “In light of that, I’ll have to keep this short. We know most of it already: you’ve intentionally let objects in your home dissolve; you’ve been conspiring with the librarian Samins’ Evgen….”
Harri nodded when Vanja gave a start. “Yes, he confessed, too. He didn’t mention you, but Nina knew that the two of you were friends. And then there’s what we’ve gleaned from your notes—that you’ve been conspiring with Sarols’ Ulla, and that you’ve studied subversive documents she kept in her room. We found the box. Ulla sold you out, Vanja.”
When Vanja opened her mouth to protest, he held up a hand. With the other, he opened the notebook. “I quote: ‘…that I know exactly how things really are and still claim that E.H.S.’s products are made of something else. Calls the cup a knife. U. refers to the bag and that I wanted it to dissolve because I’m unhappy with the order of things.’ Do you deny that you wrote this? No?” He leaned forward. “And as we know, it doesn’t end there. You’ve been outside the colony, and you’ve approached quarantined areas. And finally this. Looting the archive and exposing sensitive documents.” He leaned back. “That someone would do these things…it makes me so sad.”
He seemed to be waiting for an answer. Vanja couldn’t summon the strength to speak.
Harri shook his head. “You’re not the first to foment rebellion.”
Vanja could hear the quotation marks around the last word. “The powers that be, we’re tyrants, right? It’s oppression, right?” He tilted his head to catch Vanja’s eye. “Right?”
“Yes,” Vanja managed. It came out as an “uh.”
“You know how this place works. Everyone does. We’re a finite population in a world we don’t really understand. We struggle endlessly to maintain order. That struggle entails a society with strict rules.”
Harri turned the cup in his hands. “What’s less widely known
is that we have nowhere else to go, Vanja. We can’t go back. The way is shut. Our only choice is to either follow the rules or be destroyed.” His eyes were welling up. “People will die because of what you’ve done, Vanja. People have already died.”
“We’re already dead.” Vanja forced the words out between dry lips. “This is no life. You’ve taken it.”
Harri raised his eyebrows. “Who do you mean by ‘you,’ Vanja? The committee is elected by the people. The committee is the people. We can be deposed at any time. Anyone can stand in the election. You’ve voted, haven’t you? Maybe you’ve even been a candidate?”
Vanja squeezed her mouth shut.
Harri sighed and got out of his chair again. “I’m given to understand that you’ve led a difficult life, Vanja. You’re angry and disappointed. We’ve all agreed on a set of rules necessary for our survival, but some people just can’t live by them. You’re raging against a system you feel protects the group but hurts you. So you’ve decided to overthrow the system and let the group perish. Have I got that right?”
Harri waited for a moment. When Vanja didn’t reply, he raised his voice. “You’re not very chatty, are you? Is this fair, d’you think? To let innocent citizens pay? If that isn’t taking someone’s life, I don’t know what is. Putting yourself above what the people have decided. Have you really nothing to say about that?”
Vanja drew a deep breath. “But that’s not how it is. People are unhappy….”
“You are unhappy. And you’re alone now. Your coconspirators have left you behind.”
A low rumble outside made them both jump. Harri got hold of himself. “Well, then. We’re out of time. I’m sorry about what has to happen now, but that’s just how it is. You’ve left us no choice.”
There was a stinging pain in her arm. “Berols’ Anna,” Vanja said. Pressure was spreading through her chest, making it hard to breathe. Her field of vision began to flicker and narrow. Through the haze, she saw the speaker lean in, his eyes widened. “Berols’ Anna is coming.”
Amatka Page 17
